ARTS ONLINE; How Two Sites Plus Two Casts Equals One Musical

In the musical ''1776,'' John Adams attends the Continental Congress while his wife, Abigail, stays home in Braintree, Mass. Although these characters are separated by a great distance, the actors portraying them share the stage as they sing ''Yours, Yours, Yours.'' But what if the Internet allowed them to perform their duet from afar, with one really in Philadelphia, the other really in Massachusetts and an audience looking on from virtually anywhere?

Since the dawn of the telecommunications era, artists have explored how technology might revolutionize theater, music, dance and other stage presentations. A frequent technique has been to place people in different locations and unite them in performance electronically. Television does this daily of course, but access to studios and broadcast equipment is limited and expensive.

With its promise of cheap, readily available bandwidth, the Internet has become the medium of choice for such multisite performance experiments. The curtain rises on the next one tomorrow night at 8, when New York University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., jointly present ''The Technophobe and the Madman,'' a 40-minute theater piece that its producers are billing as ''the first Internet2-distributed musical.''

Yes, there have been musicals on the commonly accessible Internet. This time, though, technical concerns will prevent online viewers from seeing the show at academy.rpi .edu/projects/technophobe until Thursday.

What is new here is the use of Internet2, a high-speed network under development by a consortium of 180 universities. It is thousands of times faster than the standard Internet, capable of transmitting high-quality audio and video with almost no delay.

Speedy delivery of sound and images is essential to tomorrow's performers. Some will be onstage in Troy and others in Manhattan. At Rensselaer an actress and two musicians will present ''The Technophobe'' section; at N.Y.U. an actor and two more musicians will simultaneously present ''The Madman'' portion, but the performance is meant to be seamless, and at the moment Internet2 comes closest to accomplishing that.

There will still be a small delay -- about one-third of a second -- as the action bounces between locations. Pauses work better for Pinter plays than for musicals, so the composers had to accommodate them to sustain the flow as the notes travel 162 miles from one stage to another.

''From one chord change to the next, we'll write in the score which city goes first,'' said Robert Rowe, the show's N.Y.U. producer. Mr. Rowe and his two co-composers, Neil Rolnick and Nick Didkovsky, also give the actors plenty of space for vocal improvisation, which will make the tiny, unavoidable delays part of the performance.

Although each site will have a different set (the N.Y.U. crew will use the same backdrop as its current production of ''Guys and Dolls''), onstage video screens and speakers will help blend the performances for live audiences at each location.

For a musical this is admittedly way-off Broadway. Technology may create special effects onstage, but for most ticket buyers, the magic of the theater depends on actors performing for a live audience.

''For lots of theatrical experiences, that's the case,'' Mr. Rowe said. ''But what is available to you artistically if you look at it the other way?''

Artists have been seeking answers to this question for decades. As early as the late 1970's, electronic artists like Douglas Davis used satellite feeds to create multisite video art performances. At the opening ceremony of the 1998 Winter Olympics, Seiji Ozawa was able to conduct Beethoven's ''Ode to Joy'' with choruses on five continents. Choreographers have also staged multisite works, with dancers in different cities pirouetting on the same video screen.

The technology tends to overwhelm the artistry in these events, but often the goal is to reveal the nature of the electronic self.

Sherrie Rabinowitz, co-founder of the Electronic Cafe International in Santa Monica, Calif., and a multisite performance pioneer, asked, ''What does it mean when my image and his image kiss?,'' imagining a scene between herself and another actor in different locations. ''How does it feel?''

George Coates, founder of George Coates Performance Works, a high-tech theater troupe, said that the lure of technology was strong. ''Every time a new technology comes along and artists start playing with it, we always want to do everything that's possible,'' he said. ''Gradually you start using it in more sophisticated ways, like advancing the narrative. I've learned that if it doesn't add a capability that you couldn't do otherwise, it's all an academic exercise.''

In 1994 Mr. Coates's troupe staged a show in which he used a free video-conferencing Web program called CU-SeeMe to assemble a band at his San Francisco theater. During the performance the guitarist was actually in San Jose, Calif., and the bagpipe player in Australia.

Mr. Coates recalled that the members of the audience seemed unwilling to suspend their disbelief that the band was connected from such distant places through the Internet, so he had the Australian bagpiper display a copy of the next day's newspaper.

''When you're in the theater, there's always a feeling it could all be mocked up,'' he said. ''The guy from Australia could have been in the back room. The only time the audience really believed for sure it was happening is when it would break down.''

The producers insist that they have a clear advantage over previous multisite performances because they have had several months to rehearse over Internet2. (Their $100,000 musical was commissioned by Harvestworks, a New York new-media center, and financed in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.)

The ''Technophobe'' portion of the story is a familiar high-tech tale of girl creates avatar (a computer-based alter ego for herself), girl loses avatar, girl deletes avatar. Meanwhile the Madman wanders the streets of Manhattan, ranting obliquely about love and the Technophobe.

Audience members are unlikely to leave the free performance humming lines like ''We are all code, DNA spiraling endlessly,'' but the music will be quite accessible, Mr. Rowe said.

Still, the production is rooted in its multisite conception. Mr. Rowe said that works like this challenged the notion of live theater as a singular event. The audiences in Troy and Manhattan will see their own versions of the same performance, and Internet viewers will be able to watch both.

''It's not just a matter of becoming more familiar with the material,'' he said. ''Every time you look at it, you could be seeing something different.''

In other words, no matter how dramatically effective the high-tech performance of ''The Technophobe and the Madman'' might be, the play's success is still based on one of the timeless principles of show business, as espoused in the musical ''Gypsy'' by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim: ''You gotta have a gimmick.''